TEXT/ART
Rebecca Lossin
Text is not a new subject for art, nor have its components changed. But it stands as a testament to the limitless nature of a finite set of 26 character–give or take a few accents.
In 1925, Appolinaire reclaimed text as an image that had been made invisible by a redundancy of lines and columns and then necessarily destroyed by collage and Dada. His calligrams take the illegible images of chopped up text/speech and paste them back into an order that presents us once again with ambiguous yet possible meanings. In Paysage, the words form four distinct shapes: abstract images of a house, a tree, a stick figure and a smoking cigar. This is, however, not entirely true until one reads the text that forms these shapes. It is the combination of the two that reveals this simple meaning but their relationships are not indicated by much more than the title, which suggests they may occupy the same general space. Furthermore, the only indication of the course your eye should take is the shape formed by the words, the beginning and end indiscernible in the case of the house and the stick figure.
Appolinaire was one of an innumerable set of moments during which we returned from chaos to meaning if only to be launched back into it by the very page that revealed it to us. The dialogue between text and image is so involved that determining whether something is either image or text cannot be accomplished on the level of abstract definitions. Accordingly, art proceeds to examine and generate language.
